Crying for the Light; Or, Fifty Years Ago. Vol. 1 [of 3]

by J. Ewing Ritchie

Perhaps the deacon is right. It is a terrible world, this of ours, for a girl in lowly life who has more than her fair share of feminine beauty. A thousand dangers lurk on every side of her—from the enmity of woman, from the selfish cruelty of man. It is rarely that she does come to a good end.

‘What do you think she said?’ continued the senior deacon. ‘Why, that she came to hear Mr. Wentworth, and that she hopes we are going to have him for the new parson.’

Poor Rose had unwittingly filled up the measure of the new preacher’s guilt. She was the prettiest girl in the town, and, consequently, was supposed to be far, very far from the kingdom. If Mr. Wentworth had preached so as to gain the attention and excite the admiration of a young giddy girl like that, he was not the man for Bethesda; and it must be owned, I frankly admit, that he was not. He lacked what the deacons called unction in the pulpit.

To be popular, to be attractive, to retain a hold on the light and careless and the worldly, was the surest way to alarm the deacons, who guarded jealously the sanctity of the pulpit—a sanctity which had repelled from the chapel the very people whom, now-a-days, the religious world wish to get there. They were not of the world. That was their boast and privilege. They were a chosen people—a peculiar generation.

Outside were the wicked, for whom there was no mercy—nothing but a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation of the wrath of God. They looked for empty benches in chapel, for it was only the few that could be saved. If a young person wanted to join the church, the deacons were alarmed and surprised. It was almost a breach of conventional etiquette. Hence the unattractive character of their church life, the bitterness of their profession, the unloveliness of their spirit, the feebleness and failure of their efforts. It was a sin in their eyes to make religion palatable to the worldly. Rarely did the sons of these good men follow in their fathers’ steps, too many of them fell into evil courses, and those of them who did become church members were by no means the salt of the earth. Wentworth, as was to be expected, with his open, manly nature, disliked not a little the spirit of the people—their petty quarrels, their miserable ignorance, their attachment to the letter, their forgetfulness of the spirit of the Gospel.

At Bethesda, as the meeting-house was called, there had been a venerable and godly man in the pulpit for nearly fifty years. Never had the grace of Christian humility been more strikingly displayed than by him. He had ever been thankful for small mercies—for the leg of pork, the ton of coals, the load of wood, the old clothes for his children, the new hat for himself—the casual gifts of sundry of his flock who were not quite so stingy as the rest. The wear and tear of a long life had taken all the fight out of him. Even the parson of the parish held him to be a harmless man, and was sorry to note how the race of such godly men was gradually becoming extinct, as Dissent claimed not kindly patronage, not condescending toleration, but civil and religious equality. A wonderful art had that old man for making things pleasant all round. He was truly all things to all men. The young people rather looked down on him, but he did not mind that. To his deacons he was always respectful, and never did he offend in any way their wives. Indeed, they had been known to take his part when some stray guest, some pert young miss from London town, had endeavoured to make fun of his old battered hat, his rusty black clothes, his patched-up shoes, his grotesque figure, his ancient air, his monotonous delivery, his high doctrine. But the fact was, few young persons did go to meeting, and, as the old people died off, the display of empty benches and empty pews was a sorry spectacle.

CHAPTER VII.
THE CHARTISTS.

After the war with France, which culminated in Waterloo, England enjoyed a period of rest and repose; and she needed it, after her long struggle, which had robbed her of thousands and thousands of valuable lives, and heaped upon her a national debt under the burden of which she still groans. Then came a serious problem. The war over, what was to be done with the residuum, who, in the good old times, had been marched off to the tune of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England,’ or ‘Rule, Britannia,’ or ‘God save the King,’ to be food for powder, and to whiten with their bones half the battle-fields of Europe?

At Sloville the difficulty was much felt, till one or two capitalists selected it as the site for manufactories. It was in one of the midland counties, where collieries abounded, and where canals offer a cheap means of transit for manufactures. The place grew like Jonah’s gourd. In the twinkling of an eye it became a town. All at once the sky was darkened with black clouds of smoke, vomited forth by the mills, whilst long rows of red-brick cottages, utterly barren of interest and comfort, spread themselves over all the adjacent fields. For a time all was couleur de rose. The neighbouring landlords kept up their rents, and the farmers made a lot of money by supplying the town; the tradesmen found business increase with no efforts of their own. Everyone was making money, and if the poor were badly off, it was chiefly their own fault, as what wages they earned were too frequently squandered in the public-house.

But prosperity in this world is seldom of long duration. The markets were glutted, because the foreigner, who had only corn to send us to pay for our wares, was prevented by the Corn Laws from sending us his corn. At the same time we had a succession of bad harvests, and bread was almost as dear as in time of war. It is hard to be happy when you are hungry. Discontent is the natural result of starvation, and democratic newspapers and writers, who had never shown their faces in the place before, were in great demand. It was an awful sight to see the people sulking in the streets, starving in their wretched homes, cursing—in some of the lowest of the public-houses—all who were better off than themselves. ‘They were,’ they were told, ‘a down-trodden people, the victims of a haughty aristocracy, or of a bastard plutocracy, that had fattened on the blood and sinew of the white slaves.’ ‘Down with the capitalist!’ was the universal cry; and so the mills were burnt, as if by the destruction of workshops there would be demand for work. Soldiers were quartered everywhere. On every side was a rich class, face to face with a hungry people, rendered desperate by poverty, and want, and wrong.